WASHINGTON — Robert F. Bennett, a business executive and three-term senator who epitomized Utah’s Republican establishment and became in 2010 the first high-profile political casualty of an anti-Washington fervor surging through his party, died May 4 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 82.
The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer and a stroke, Mr. Bennett’s assistant Tara Tanner announced.
Mr. Bennett had a lucrative career in corporate management, notably as chief executive of the start-up Franklin Institute, a time management company that holds seminars and makes best-selling day planners.
He stepped down in 1991 from the company, now known as Franklin Covey, with a reported net worth of more than $25 million, and with his eye on the open Senate seat once held by his father.
At 6 feet 6 inches tall, and with a bald pate and protruding ears, Bennett called attention to his looks in campaign slogans, with one proclaiming: “Big Heart. Big Ideas. Big Ears.’’
Mr. Bennett was a respected and soft-spoken legislative consigliere to Senate leaders including Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, and rose to prominence on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and the powerful Appropriations Committee. He sprinkled hundreds of millions of dollars on home state businesses and projects through spending bill earmarks.
A vigorously free-market conservative, Mr. Bennett opposed measures to regulate corporations and tighten campaign finance rules. He was a party loyalist but won praise from Democrats for his behind-the-scenes pragmatism and diligence on legislation of broad interest.
Most notably, he worked with Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, on a bipartisan attempt to overhaul the health care insurance system. Their Healthy Americans Act, first proposed in 2007, was an effort to marry the Democrats’ wish for universal coverage with the GOP’s emphasis on consumer choice and market forces.
The act drew many admirers but did not reach the floor for a vote.
However, one of the Wyden-Bennett provisions involving flexibility for states carrying out a universal health care mandate was included in the Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in 2010.
Mr. Bennett opposed the Affordable Care Act, citing the excessive spending he said it would require.
“I cared about the details because I looked at the accounting,’’ he told NPR. “I looked at the cost, I look at the devastation it would incur on states and the impact it would have on Medicare and all of the other things that were wrong with it.’’
As he prepared to seek a fourth term, he found himself out of favor with hard-right activists in his party who demanded more than opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
With the economy still reeling from the 2008 recession, antitax crusaders and conservative broadcasters such as Glenn Beck fingered Mr. Bennett as a symbol of big government and fiscal irresponsibility and rallied the grass roots to boot him and other incumbents from office.
Mr. Bennett, who had broken a promise to serve no more than two terms, also suffered from an impression among voters that he was too preoccupied with wonkish legislative endeavors and insufficiently attentive to constituent needs.
Mr. Bennett’s upset in 2010 was made possible in part by a quirk in the Utah nominating system, which requires delegates to bestow their blessing at a convention before the primary. At the convention, Mr. Bennett was jeered as “Bailout Bob’’ and a “RINO’’ — Republican in Name Only — and came in third among eight contenders.
“The political world changed underneath Bob Bennett’s feet,’’ Norman J. Ornstein, an American Enterprise Institute congressional scholar, said in an interview.
“He was a creature of an era that had passed, especially for the Republican Party,’’ Ornstein said. “He had sterling conservative credentials but believed in compromise where you wanted to get things done, and he believed in the institution of Congress. Those were once badges of honor, but they became black marks for activist, radical conservatives.’’
Robert Foster Bennett was born in Salt Lake City on Sept. 18, 1933.
He graduated from the University of Utah in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and served as the student body president.
In 1971, he bought Robert R. Mullen Co., a public relations firm that seemed to be a conspiracy theorist’s dream: It served as a front for CIA personnel, employed the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt as a writer, and helped represent the political interests of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.
Mr. Bennett alerted Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to Hunt’s CIA background, a critical early step in unraveling the maze of illegal activity that led directly to the Nixon White House.
In 1962, Mr. Bennett married Joyce McKay. Besides his wife, he leaves six children and 20 grandchildren.
After his election loss, Mr. Bennett became a political consultant and lobbyist and lectured at universities in Utah and Washington.
“The political atmosphere, obviously, has been toxic and it’s very clear some of the votes that I have cast have added to the toxic environment,’’ Mr. Bennett told the Salt Lake Tribune after his defeat. “Looking back on them — with one or two very minor exceptions — I wouldn’t have cast any of them any differently even if I'd known at the time it would cost me my career because I have always done the best I can to cast the vote that I think is best for the state and best for the country.’’
